It was once the case that should you left Biglaw for a small, boutique, or midsize agency, you needed to anticipate a pay reduce. It won’t have been an enormous pay reduce, possibly $10K or $20K under the usual Biglaw scale — however given the alternatives supplied by smaller corporations, together with extra duty, higher shopper contact, and (possibly) higher work-life stability, many attorneys seen the trade-off as value it.
However as individuals who have adopted our salary and bonus coverage have absolutely observed, going to a smaller agency not requires taking a smaller paycheck. In reality, numerous small, boutique, and midsize corporations pay the identical as — or much more than — their Biglaw opponents. Not surprisingly, a rising variety of gifted regulation college students and younger attorneys are selecting to start out their careers at smaller corporations, bypassing the few years in Biglaw that historically represented the dues that needed to be paid earlier than shifting on to work at an elite boutique.
However how are you going to discover the small, boutique, and midsize corporations the place you’d truly wish to work — and the place you’d be paid handsomely? Fortunately, there’s a Vault rating for that. The Top 150 Under 150 rating “acknowledge[s] excellent small and midsize regulation corporations that ship large outcomes.” Right here’s the methodology Vault used:
To find out the High 150 Beneath 150, Vault first developed a listing of the best-known and most sought-after U.S. corporations with 150 attorneys or fewer. Our editorial and analysis groups pored via Vault survey information, information tales, commerce journals, and different authorized publications; spoke with attorneys within the discipline; and reviewed different revealed rankings. Vault editors additionally assessed every agency for status, high quality of life, {and professional} progress alternatives after which narrowed down the outcomes to provide you with a listing of 150 regulation corporations identified for offering top-notch service and delivering large outcomes.
Vault’s High 150 Beneath 150 checklist shouldn’t be numerically ranked, however alphabetized, so we’ve picked out a couple of recognizable corporations that made the reduce:
- Axinn
- AZA
- Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors
- Clement & Murphy
- Desmarais
- Edelson
- Elsberg Baker & Maruri
- Greenberg Glusker
- Hecker Fink
- Holwell Shuster & Goldberg
- Hueston Hennigan
- McKool Smith
- Reid Collins & Tsai
- Selendy Homosexual
- Tensegrity Regulation Group
- Wilkinson Stekloff
- Yetter Coleman
Though they’re not Biglaw corporations, these names ought to all be acquainted — some for his or her Supreme Court docket and appellate practices, some for being extremely profitable spinoffs, some for his or her agency tradition specializing in lawyer happiness, and others for providing salaries and bonuses that compete with or blow their Biglaw brethren out of the water. For the total checklist, click on here.
Congratulations to Vault’s High 150 Beneath 150. In the case of regulation corporations, larger isn’t all the time higher.
Top 150 Under 150 (2026) [Vault]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Regulation, the place she’s labored since 2011. She’d love to listen to from you, so please be at liberty to email her with any ideas, questions, feedback, or critiques. You possibly can observe her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or join together with her on LinkedIn.
